Author, Musician, Researcher, Educator, Exiled Brooklynite

September 2011

2011.09.21

I've somehow bamboozled my friend Peter Maass, the deservedly award-winning war correspondent and nonfiction author, to come give a talk at Rutgers in two weeks. I can't wait. Peter embodies that rare combination of intelligence, experience and humillity that makes for a great journalist, and a riveting lecturer.

The lecture is free! Hope you can make it. (You can download the flier here)

2011.09.11

I was just starting my daily journal entry on my Palm Pilot III, but I had nothing much to say. Another day on the way to work, a perfect blue sky to be witnessed through my office windows. The first thing to intrude on my groggy, early-week brain was an announcement from the train conductor. We were going to skip the Cortland Street/World Trade Center stop because of a “smoke condition.”

Understatement of the decade.

At the next station, City Hall, a woman got onto my car in tears. I asked her what the matter was. She worked in the twin towers, she told me, and a plane had hit the building. I assumed it was a John Denver style accident involving a small Cessna or something. “Wow,” I told her pedantically. “You just witnessed an important part of New York history.”

Understatement of the century.

I got out at 8th Street, and as soon as I hit the open air, some random guy walked up to me and shouted, “another plane just flew down Broadway. It hit the other tower!” Even at the time, I thought it was strange that he would assume I knew about the first tower, given that I’d been in the subway when it happened.

I went upstairs to my office, which was on the 9th floor and had an unobstructed view of the towers. The northern one had a huge gaping hole in it, full of smoke and flame. The southern one was just gushing grey smoke. We stood there, my friends and I, and watched, and speculated about the scale of death. We were all business analysts, so we were good at estimating figures based on scant data. Fortunately, we inflated our projections as usual. I think the accepted number was something like 10,000 fatalities. My friend Rob, a normally acerbic, politically conservative smart alec, was speechless, with tears streaming down his cheeks. For some reason, this image has stayed with me.

We went up to the roof for a better view. The towers were getting blacker, and we could smell the smoke in the air, kind of a burnt-lasagna odor. We could hear sirens everywhere, and the city seemed to buzz with 10 million conversations on the same subject. We even thought we might be able to see people jumping out of the hole in the north tower. I decided it was time to get out of Manhattan, before the subways closed.

I took what may have been the last train out, an L to Brooklyn. From there, I hailed a cab home to Metrotech, and called Dunia while I watched the towers smolder across the river. “We’re leaving,” I told her. “I know,” she said. By this point, the plume of smoke was arcing across to Brooklyn, landing somewhere in the middle of Park Slope. For some reason I was still journaling in my Palm Pilot. “I’m sweating bullets,” I wrote, “I’m not sure whether it’s from biological weapons or just fear.”

I ran upstairs to my apartment, grabbed Dunia and the cat (my brilliant wife had bought a cat carrier while I made my way home), and headed out to Long Island. My dad lived on the south shore, and he had a sailboat, so I figured if things got ugly – like nuclear ugly – we could make our escape by sea. I drove pell mell, heading east as quickly as I could, heading the wrong way down one-way streets and trying to avoid major arteries.

The phone rang. It was my friend Jake, who had been headed to his office in Tribeca from Park Slope. The train had stopped running while he was still at Smith-9th St., an elevated station in Brooklyn. Jake was wondering whether it still made sense to go to work, and if so, how he would get there. “Stay right where you are,” I told him. “I’m coming to pick you up.”

By the time we got to Park Slope, it looked like a blizzard had hit. Huge white flakes of ash were everywhere, limiting visibility to a few feet. Somehow, I found Jake. The ashes had settled all over his black coat. “Get in the car,” I told him. “But first brush yourself off. You have people on you.” He got in the car, and I sped down the Belt to the Southern State. “I wonder if we should go back and help,” the generous Jake said. “No fucking way,” said selfish me. Somehow I convinced him it would be fruitless to even get into Manhattan, and we continued out to Long Island.

By the time I got to my dad’s house, he, my stepmother, my 17-year-old brother and some of his buds were all crowded around CNN. We spent the next few days just watching the TV, talking politics, and trying to make sense of the trickles of data that were emerging. Al Qaeda, 3,000 deaths, the Pentagon, Pennsylvania. We were definitely going to war, but against whom? My sweet brother said he felt sorry for all the innocent people we were about to attack in the name of self-defense. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” my father told him. “We’re at war with them now.” For him, the attacks were further proof that the Clash of Civilizations was underway. It was freedom and democracy versus autocratic Islam, and we had no choice but to win at any cost. “He does so know what he’s talking about,” I said, defending my brother.

We fought for a few days, until Jake got fed up and left. Soon Dunia and I headed home too. It seemed like the immediate danger had past, but we weren’t exactly “safe” either. We had no language to describe this new sense of vulnerability, this feeling that death awaited around every corner. We would come to call it “reality.”

In the months that ensued, Dunia and I and everyone we knew got as drunk as possible or as high as possible as often as possible. Together with our friends Harry and Maryam, we lay on our roof in Metrotech watching hundreds of high-flying planes deploying in formation, looking like constellations with purpose in the night sky.

At first, everyone in the city was nice to each other. Creepily nice. Making eye contact, giving each other food. Stuff like that. Then people got angry. You had to work hard not to provoke a fight. I remember watching Dunia walk down the stairs behind me in the Broadway-Lafayette subway station. There was a guy between us on the stairs, and I guess he thought I was looking at him. “What the FUCK are you looking at?” He advanced on me menacingly. “He’s looking at me,” Dunia had to tell him. I also remember a gaggle of teenage girls in head scarves walking down Astor Place. One of them was very pretty, and I must have been checking her out or something. She got up in my face. “What the fuck are you looking at?” she shouted. “Something you wanna ask me?” “No,” I said, and looked away. We hadn’t stepped foot in Afghanistan yet, but we were already at war with ourselves.

The next summer, Dunia and I moved to Los Angeles. I had already been in the process of applying to doctoral programs when the planes hit, but the attacks cemented the deal. Before we left, I took to calling New York a “necropolis.” I was sure a mushroom cloud would appear over the city before long, or everyone would drop dead of Anthrax.

Even after we moved, our wounds remained raw. One day we were driving down the freeway, and we saw a missile climb through the sky, then explode in a cloud of dazzling silver dust. It must have been a test launch for a satellite or something, but we were sure it was our last moment. I turned to face her, and we said our goodbyes. Strangely, no one else on the road seemed to notice or care. Fortunately, I didn’t crash the car.

Another time, I was in the laundromat in Hollywood. A large woman was wearing an XXL t-shirt with an image of the towers wrapped in a red, white and blue ribbon, and the legend “We will never forget.” I approached her. “What won’t you forget?” I demanded. She didn’t know what I was talking about. “I was there,” I insisted. “I’m the one who will never forget. You saw it on television. You weren’t there!” She seemed taken aback, but she stood her ground. “I wear this shirt because my son is a volunteer fireman,” she told me. Well, ok. That made sense, I guess.

I’ve tried not to linger on the memories, and to let my anger go. At first, I had fantasies about physically torturing Osama Bin Laden for what he’d done to my city, to my life. But by the time he was assassinated in his luxury hiding hole, I felt nothing. No victory, no vindication. Maybe just a little more morose than usual.

The music probably helped. A week or two after the attacks, I wrote a song called “Can You Tell,” kind of a journalistic description of the events. I played it with Brave New Girl while we were still in NYC, and then we played it a bunch with Dubistry in Los Angeles. We finally recorded it this week, to get it out in time for the anniversary. I also wrote a song a few years later called “Windows on the World,” which was the name of the restaurant at the top of one of the towers. Dunia and I used to go swing dancing there in the late ‘90s.

Now I have two kids, who have never known any world but the post-attack world. They’ve lived in New York, taken the Governor’s Island ferry and played on the Brooklyn promenade but never seen the towers grace the lower Manhattan skyline. This morning, Dunia and I told Simon, who is 7, a condensed version of the story. He listened dutifully, but without much interest or concern. He would have been equally interested to hear about WWII or the Civil War. Somehow that comforts me. Afterwards, I held him in my arms as long as he would let me. “I’m glad I survived,” I told him. “Because otherwise I wouldn’t have had you” I think he knew what I meant.

2011.09.07

We professors in the 21st century have a dilemma: we want our students to use laptops and the internet in class, but we don't want them getting sucked into a digital vortex and missing out on class conversations.

My solution from here on in is to set up a Twitter backchannel, and require that all connected students participate. Then I'll use my iPad to search for the class-specific hashtag, and integrate online student comments into the in-person discussion. Here's the exact wording from my syllabus:

This class has a strict LAPTOP POLICY: If you have your laptop open, you must contribute to the class discussion via the online backchannel as well as verbally. Specifically, you must tweet at least three comments about our readings/discussion per class session. The hashtag for our class will be #[redacted]. If you don’t know how to use Twitter, either figure it out or refrain from bringing your laptop to class.

Let's hope it works. I'll update this post at the end of the semester, and let you know.